I decided to dig through open source to examine the state of Google's upcoming Andromeda OS. For anyone unfamiliar, Andromeda seems to be the replacement for both Android and Chrome OS (cue endless debates over the semantics of that, and what it all entails). Fuchsia is the actual name of the operating system, while Magenta is the name of the kernel, or more correctly, the microkernel. Many of the architectural design decisions appear to have unsurprisingly been focused on creating a highly scalable platform.

It goes without saying that Google isn't trying to hide Fuchsia. People have clearly discovered that Google is replacing Android's Linux kernel. Still, I thought it would be interesting for people to get a better sense of what the OS actually is. This article is only intended to be an overview of the basics, as far as I can comment reasonably competently. (I certainly never took an operating systems class!)

To my naive eyes, rather than saying Chrome OS is being merged into Android, it looks more like Android and Chrome OS are both being merged into Fuchsia. It's worth noting that these operating systems had previously already begun to merge together to an extent, such as when the Android team worked with the Chrome OS team in order to bring Update Engine to Nougat, which introduced A/B updates to the platform.

Google is unsurprisingly bringing up Andromeda on a number of platforms, including the humble Intel NUC. ARM, x86, and MIPS bring-up is exactly what you would expect for an Android successor, and it also seems clear that this platform will run on Intel laptops.

Learn from MS...Learn from MS...(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 16 2017, @01:56AM

Sure, you can bring a new OS to take over the world. Three things:
- Security. From day 1
- Easy to get executables for it (compatibility layers or well-fed app store)
- Don't you [bleep]ing expect all form factors to use the same interface.

Good luck.

PS: if you fail, you have to fix all the Android fragmentation and security issues. If you succeed, you still have to fix all the Android security issues.PPS: Don't bake the spyware in.

Re:Learn from MS...Re:Learn from MS...(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 16 2017, @03:04AM

I don't think that Android is any less "secure" than Linux. The problem with Android is, who "owns" the device, and thus the OS. If your telco "owns" the device, and lets you use it for a fee, then the OS can be considered at least moderately secure, from their point of view. Relatively few of us actually root our phones, to take real ownership of the phone. Most phones continue to report statistics back to the telco and/or the manufacturer for all of their useful lives. That's pretty "secure" from their point of view. If other apps gain root, and report the user's data to third parties, that is inconsequential to the telco.

The business model needs to change, before end users can consider their phones to be secure. I'm not an Apple fan, but those people have a much better perspective on security than the Android crowd does. The end user owns the phone, if they agree to stay inside the garden. He still owns the phone, if he goes outside the garden, but there are consequences for wandering around outside. Still, the phone stays pretty secure.

Re:Learn from MS...(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 17 2017, @04:19PM

I gave your post a little thought, off and on. Didn't Apple tell Big Brother to take a leap, because they couldn't break into a phone? At the least, Apple respects your ownership of a phone enough to refuse to be a party to spying on you. Apple's phone, or your phone? Whichever, it's a better deal than you're going to get on the average smart phone.

Five thingsFive things(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday February 16 2017, @04:59AM

Sure, you can bring a new OS to take over the world. Three things:
- Security. From day 1
- Easy to get executables for it (compatibility layers or well-fed app store)
- Don't you [bleep]ing expect all form factors to use the same interface.

- Root access without having to do more than either login as root or su as a user
- Any GNU/Linux (or BSD) software that works on my Atom netbook works on Fuschia

They do seem to be rather shy about specifying the license. You may need to download the source to find out what it is, as I didn't see anything while around the site. A short google search reports "License, Various, including Revised BSD, MIT and Apache 2. ", so perhaps there's no consistent license.

That's a bit scary. If the "various licenses" are for libraries used by Andromeda and not Andromeda itself, it could be that there is no license at all. And that doesn't mean a free-for-all: If there's no license then they haven't granted the public license to do anything, and that means they could at any time sue anyone who's using their code for copyright violation.

Well, yes. I use a chromebook -- Asus Chromebook Flip; the best ARM netbook I know of. I was thinking of blowing away ChromeOS completely, but initially set up Crouton (a chroot-based heap of scripts and what-not to run Debian, Ubuntu, etc. alongside ChromeOS) and was won over by the convenience of that combination; I have ChromeOS on one hand for the 2/3 (or more) of time I'm in a web browser or ssh terminal, and an X server on the second virtual console for everything else.

I'm not real concerned with Google spying on me, because even if I had nuked ChromeOS, I would still be running Chrome or Chromium, still using GMail, etc.; this computer was always going to be pre-compromised in the name of convenience. (I have other computers that I'm less tolerant of spyware on, but this one's not meant for serious business.)

FWIW, I don't think I'll be interested in this successor OS; ChromeOS iis only handy because of the ease of running normal Linux distros alongside, and I don't expect that will be a priority for Andromeda.